Friday, January 19, 2007

Reading thoughts

I started a book last night called "What Video Games Have to Teach Us about learning and Literacy" by James Paul Gee. As a concerned mother I'm always wondering if my children are spending too much time on the computer and other media sources. So I read everything I can on the subject. After reading only part of the introduction I was feeling very overwhelmed. Maybe I was tired (it was evening, after all), but I was starting to feel anxiety radiate from my stomach to my outer limbs as I tried to decipher his sentences. He's a professor of reading at a university in the States and I think you need to be another professor to understand what he has to say. Basically, I am getting the impression that he is in favor of the learning that goes on when playing video games. He has some interesting ideas about reading and literacy that confirm what I have heard from other sources, most recently Susan Wise Bauer. Reading is more than just decoding the words. Your life experiences, background, culture etc. all play into what you get out of what you read. I am intrigued enough by the little that I got out of my journey into his book last night to attempt to try again today. If I get bogged down I will cut to the chase and skip to the ending chapters to see how he concludes the whole thing. I hope that I don't learn that I should be playing video games for brain development!

2 comments:

Well, I'll let you read it and then you can let me know what the experts say :) I'm sure there is some good to playing video games, but I'm sure anything in excess is probably detrimental. And we have to ask ourselves what are our children not doing when they spend so much time on the computer? I still feel that it needs to be regulated.